Most social scientists—and most people—believe that the
pace of social change is accelerating. The sense of accelerating change
has been a defining feature of modernity since the 18th century. But
today the speed and form of change are unprecedented, such that the very
idea of society—understood as a set of stable institutions with
clear boundaries and tasks—has come into question.

In a process Anthony Giddens calls ‘disembedding’ (1990,
pp. 21–29), social institutions are increasingly disconnected from
people’s everyday concerns, and so less and less able to supply
people with any meaningful orientation and reliable systems of support.
Social change is no longer a process of gradual and controlled transformations,
revisions, modifications, and adjustments. Rather, social reproduction
is increasingly messy and confused. ‘Change’ no longer means
a temporary break in the routine or its correction, but has become more
or less constant. Accelerating and ‘disembedding’ change
has expanded our opportunities, but does not always enhance our autonomy.
Indeed, the bewildering array of choices we now confront is often paralysing.

Everyday life is today, as always, more or less based on routine. But
our routines are increasingly uncertain and fragile, and seem to lack
a stable normative basis. We can observe this everywhere—in the
world of work and in family life, even in intimate relationships, where ‘commitment’ often
means only ‘till further notice’. All social ties are becoming
more brittle and temporary. The breakdown of established normative and
symbolic structures dissolves existing identities and forms of life,
without providing in their place new orienting reference-points.
As Nisbet argues, the real problem is not ‘the loss of old contexts
but rather the failure … to create new contexts of associations
and moral cohesion’ (2000, p. 48).

It is not surprising, then, that many social scientists have rediscovered
concepts of confidence, trust, cooperation, social capital and so on,
all of which are envisaged as at least partial remedies to our current
predicament. In the now burgeoning literature, trust occupies centre
stage, because trust is considered critical to both social integration
through cooperation and to people’s psychological well-being. Indeed,
one common diagnosis of our predicament is that our societies are seriously
deficient in trust. Contributors to the debate dispute the form and pervasiveness
of this deficiency, and not all of them subscribe to Robert Putnam’s
thesis of our ‘bowling alone’ (2000). Nonetheless, the idea
persists that we live in a ‘society of strangers’, a ‘cynical
society’, a ‘culture of suspicion’, or a ‘culture
of fear’. Whether, and to what degree, this perception reflects
social reality is not so easy to tell, because the perception itself
constitutes a social fact. It also depends on our understanding of trust
and this is one of the topics the expanding literature on trust is addressing.

All social ties are becoming
more brittle and temporary.

The Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust represents a notable addition
to this literature. Its editors aim to promote works that ‘raise
questions about how trust can be distinguished from other means of promoting
cooperation and explore those analytic and empirical issues that advance
our comprehension of the roles and limits of trust in social, political,
and economic life’, and not only enrich social science but also
inform public policy (Ostrom & Walker 2003, p. v). The two works
reviewed here appear as volumes IV and VI in this series. They are quite
different in style, method, and theoretical underpinnings, but both attempt
to provide rigorous, scholarly analyses of the social phenomenon of trust.

Russell Hardin’s Trust and Trustworthiness consists of
several interconnected chapters, various versions of which have been
published earlier. The first part of the book clarifies concepts and
examines a range of theoretical propositions—partly in support
of Hardin’s conclusions, partly as criticism that warrants a different
understanding of the relevant concepts to those found in the ‘mainstream’ literature.
The second part tests the explanatory power of these propositions, and
examines a range of diagnoses of the state of trust in contemporary societies.

Trust has many forms and even more meanings. It is, however, possible
to find an overlapping set of characteristics of trust, which most authors—often
working with quite diverse theoretical assumptions—accept with
some variations and additions (see, for example, Luhmann 1979; Barber
1983; Gambetta et al. 1988; Barbalet 1996; Sztompka 1999; and Offe 1999).
First of all, trust is usually envisaged as situated ‘in a set
of belief concepts bounded at the extremes by faith and confidence, where
the variable significance of evidence or proof is matched by a compensating
level of affectivity’ (Hart 1988, p. 188). Trust, then, is connected
to both cognition and emotions. Trust allows us to ‘stabilise’ parameters
of our actions under conditions of contingency, by enabling us to presume
generally ‘benign or at least non-hostile intentions on the part
of partners in social interactions’ (Hart 1988, p. 188). Or, as
Gambetta beautifully puts it, trust is ‘a device for coping with
the freedom of others’ (1988, p. 219), meaning that the limits
of our foresight and uncertainty about other people’s behaviour
are central to trust.

Trust has many forms and even
more meanings.

Hardin develops his own account of trust within the modified ‘rational-choice’ paradigm,
of which the basic premise is that both the truster and the trustee act
to maximise their utilities by rational calculations that take into account
available information. Trust, according to Hardin, refers to ‘essentially rational
expectations about the self-interested behaviour of the trusted’ (p.
6, italics mine), although he does allow also for other motivations (or
incentives), such as morality, reciprocity and the like (p. 13). He constructs
a model of a specific type of trust, based on the notion of ‘encapsulated
interest’(pp. 3–13): ‘I trust you because
I think it is in your interest to attend to my interests in the relevant
matter’ (p. 4). Hardin considers this the most general of currently
available models of trust, with wide explanatory power.

In Trust and Reciprocity, Elinor Ostrom and James Walker approach
the problem of cooperation and trust from a different direction. Analysis
of field studies and laboratory experiments prompted Ostrom (and some
of her co-authors) to investigate the observed discrepancy between the
grim predictions of rational choice theory and the more positive findings
of empirical research. Field studies and experiments often demonstrate
peoples’ willingness to cooperate and sustain agreements, ‘counteracting
individual temptations to select actions based on short-sighted individual
incentives’ (p. 381). Starting with this observation, Ostrom constructs
a behavioural theory of trust, based on the concept of reciprocity and
a model of the individual as a ‘fallible cognizer’, to whom
the assumptions of rational choice theory apply only as a limiting case
(p. 39). This broader model of human behaviour presumes that not only
are humans capable of learning cultural norms and institutional rules,
but that they are also capable of ‘designing new tools—including
institutions—that can change the structure of the worlds they face’ (p.
25). As a consequence, people are able to achieve results that are ‘better
than rational’ (p. 7, italics mine).

Many of the works in this collection share Ostrom and Walker’s
understanding of trust ‘as the willingness to take some risk in
relation to other individuals on the expectation that the others will
reciprocate’ (p. 382). Reciprocity, then, conceived partly as an
evolutionary trait and partly as social achievement, takes a place alongside
cooperation and trust as a central concept in the volume. However, it
is not clear that experimental research on cooperation and trust contributes
much to a better understanding of the mechanisms and conditions of trust
in the larger society, because experiments do not approximate the complex
social situations in which real actors move and make their cooperative
(or uncooperative) choices.

Ostrom constructs a behavioural
theory of trust, based on the concept of reciprocity.

One of the most important questions for the social sciences in addressing
the relationship between trust and cooperation concerns the possibility
of the ‘generalisation’ (or universalisation) of trust. This
implies at least two different meanings. On the one hand, it could refer
to whether we can develop, through participation in small-scale, mostly
intimate relationships of trust, a sort of ‘trusting habit’,
extendable to more and more people or to people separated from us by
greater social distances, up to trusting ‘strangers’. On
the other hand, it could ask whether, and under what conditions, ‘entrusting
someone with something’ can develop into a more generalised form
of trust, conductive to cooperation on a larger scale.

Hardin considers the idea of generalised trust at best insufficiently
grounded, and at worst meaningless. He argues that most of the results
of surveys and laboratory experiments usually regarded as demonstrating
the existence of generalised trust, can be reinterpreted as trust in
the form of ‘encapsulated interest’. However, his conception
ultimately renders the notion of generalised trust meaningless, because
he understands trust as an inherently micro-level phenomenon, grounded
in small-scale interactions. As a cognitive idea, it necessarily faces
epistemological limits. Not all is lost, though, because Hardin admits
the possibility of ‘quasi-trusting’ relations, or optimistic
attitudes, which are neither cognitive nor relational, but dispositional.
So while trustworthiness can be taught, mainly through experience, it
is also possible to cultivate a general optimistic disposition toward
trust, especially in children. Both require certain conditions and institutional
safeguards against the abuse of trust. That is, they basically require
conditions of confidence.

If established, Hardin argues, a ‘general atmosphere of trustworthiness
and optimistic disposition to trust makes not only the market but also
social life more generally go much better than it would without such
an atmosphere’ (p. 191). But this would still not allow us to speak
about generalised trust nor even widespread trust by any individual,
since widespread trust, according to Hardin, means no more than lots
of people, each trusting few other, ‘particular’ people (p.
179).

Hardin leaves the dilemma of
our times unresolved.

Thus, Hardin leaves the dilemma of our times unresolved. We live in
societies where social interactions beyond the intimate sphere are largely
functional interactions with ‘strangers’. How a ‘bridging’ type
of trust can be developed among strangers, what social and institutional
conditions must be present to make it still rational, perhaps with a
different understanding of rationality itself, still remains an unanswered
question not just by the two books reviewed but generally in the relevant
literature.